Ecommerce titan Amazon Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced its first fully autonomous warehouse robot last week. The Proteus robot line comes a decade after Amazon's acquisition of the Kiva robotics company and shows how far its automation ambitions have come.
In the past, Amazon's warehouse robots were a bit more infamous, being corralled behind fences to avoid running over employees and often being touted as a "replacement" for the company's human workforce by critics. Based on the video footage in Amazon's press release, its warehouse robots have come a long way, with Proteus openly roaming warehouses free of obstruction from protective fences. Using "advanced safety, perception, and navigation" technology, Proteus can detect warehouse workers and maneuver around them without putting them at risk.
"Historically, it's been difficult to safely incorporate robotics in the same physical space as people," Amazon wrote of the robot. "[Proteus] can operate in a manner that augments simple, safe interaction between technology and people-opening up a broader range of possible uses to help our employees-such as the lifting and movement of GoCarts, the non-automated, wheeled transports used to move packages through our facilities."
In addition to the cart-hauling Proteus, Amazon also announced Cardinal, a robotic arm system capable of sorting packages using AI and visual identification in place of barcodes. Intended to phase out the need for workers to twist and jerk their backs and move heavy packaging by hand, Amazon claims that Cardinal will help reduce the physical load on warehouse workers.
Amazon's announcement comes at a crucial time for the company regarding labor relations. With the e-commerce giant facing unionization drives, increasing pushback from contractors, and executives even worrying about running out of workers, the company's push into robotics seems understandable.
However, despite critics' charges of wanting to phase out human workers, Amazon has continually stated that it does not plan to replace its workers and wants to use robotics to make their jobs easier.
"We have more than a dozen other types of robotic systems in our facilities around the world, including sort centers and air hubs. From the early days of the Kiva acquisition, our vision was never tied to a binary decision of people or technology," Amazon wrote in its release. "Instead, it was about people and technology working safely and harmoniously together to deliver for our customers. That vision remains today."